Researchers seeking to cure disease or address environmental and food safety hazards face a bottleneck in electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS), which requires biospecimens be loaded and delivered to the machine one at a time. LBNL researchers set out to clear that expensive, time-consuming bottleneck with a multinozzle emitter array. The device creates smaller sample droplets, improving the sensitivity of mass spectrometry more than 10 times over conventional emitters, while speeding the process.
Work funded by a LBNL technology maturation grant demonstrated the device’s use for bioimaging and high throughput ESI-MS. A startup, Newomics, was launched, and over $3 million from SBIR Phase I and II Awards supported development of a commercial product.
Newomics released the market-ready version of the mulitnozzle emitter array, the M3, in 2017 and developed precision medicine integrated platforms that require very small amounts of blood. Among its products are blood-based assays for diabetes diagnosis and for managing and monitoring manmade chemicals in the environment, such as perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) that may damage human health. Newomics also provides industry and research organizations with services such as environmental biomonitoring, biomarker discovery and drug screening using its proprietary technologies.
